Stop Grinding on the Wrong Things: 3 Real-World Swing Interventions

If you've ever asked yourself how can I get the swing and the golf game that I've always

imagined without trying every tip, every training aid, watching every video after video

on social media, then this podcast is for you.

Welcome.

I'm Daniel Guest and welcome to the Imagine Golf Podcast.

Today's episode is brought to you by Imagine Golf and PXG.

All right, imagination.

Welcome back.

I am fresh off my, my tour win, my tour win with my father and son event with my son.

And I'm happy to say that my streak is still rock solid.

I beat him by one stroke on the last hole.

The 18th hole to sink and 18 foot, 17, 8 foot, 18 foot, birdie and rolled right into center

of the cup.

And it was amazing.

So an amazing time down in St. Pete and got to go to the vals bar and just had an amazing

time hanging out with our son.

So I know that one's for you and hopefully you never beat me, man.

But anyway, today, look, I want to talk about, you know, it's everything we do at Imagine

Golf is to make people better at golf, right?

Imagine that was a whole theme in the company.

Imagine what you could do if you were better at X, whatever X is.

Imagine if you had better clubs, or clubs that actually fit you.

Imagine if you had a better swing, a better back swing, a better, you know, contact.

And you know, you get the point, right?

And likewise, imagine if you were doing the wrong things, right?

Or working on the wrong things.

How well do you think you'd get?

I can answer that for you.

You wouldn't get any better at all.

I'd make the argument that you would get worse, all right?

So it's only Thursday.

And then Monday through Thursday, I've had a handful of students come in who had taken

instruction before who had a very clear idea on what they were working on, right?

They told me what they were working on.

They told me what they needed to fix.

And look, I hear that all the time and I don't, I don't not agree with them.

All right?

Or I don't argue with students.

I just say, hey, let's, if you don't mind, let's wipe the slate clean.

Let's take a fresh assessment of the way that you, you know, present here and now today.

And then we'll go from there.

We'll make a plan of what you're doing today, maybe not what you did before, maybe not

what you think you're doing, but it'll be a relevant plan to what you present right

here right now.

And all three of these, man, I swear to God, if they, if they kept on the road working

on what they were working on, they would have had

no chance of getting better this year or any year for that matter.

So I thought I'd talk to you about them, like these real world examples, walk you through

what happened.

And I think you'll, it'll just, it should shed, shed some light on maybe what you got

going on.

So we're going to break down these one by one, okay?

So we're going to talk about the first one, the first student, and by the way, the names

are changed to, to prevent or to protect the innocent, I guess, right?

But look, every one of these students that came in, the three that I'm about to talk to,

was passionate about golf, right?

They had a ton of enthusiasm.

They really wanted to get better.

They've been trying to get better for multiple years, and they've already seeked out a professional

instruction.

And it wasn't working for them.

And that just, that kills me because that's a, that's a bad look on the industry, right?

But they, they weren't, they weren't ever going to give up.

But they knew that they had to do something different.

So I give them all the credit in the world for seeking us out for that, right?

So the first one, let's call him Mike, all right?

Mike is a 14 handicap, right?

He is a total social media slash YouTube video junkie, all right?

He came in absolutely over, over obsessing, right, on his backswing.

He showed me half a dozen of videos on his phone.

Some of them were from two plus years ago, that's how long he's been working on this.

He was pausing some of them.

He was telling me how, look, I was clayed off, club is, and I'm doing air quotes here in

the studio laid off.

He talked about his, you know, his position at his hands at P3.

You know this guy, right?

He was talking about his takeaway was slightly inside.

He's been hitting hundreds, if not thousands of golf balls.

He practices at least twice a week.

He's a grinder, right?

So we just go through our normal routine, you know, we're assessing his swing.

I haven't hit two, usually three clubs, right?

And we're on track, man, and, and I'm not saying a whole lot, but I'm not,

I know I'm not seeing everything that he's telling me.

And the data is actually telling a totally different story, right?

He's not losing power, right?

Because of his back swing.

This guy had almost no follow through.

I mean, he has his big, big high back swing, right?

And his, once he hit the golf ball, his swing almost stopped.

I'm not even exaggerating and just kind of, you know, turned his body to the left a little

bit.

And he was definitely treating the swing as if the golf ball was the finish line, right?

He was swinging, for example, to the ball, not through the ball.

So he was so hyper focused on impact and the moment that the club face hit the ball or

hit the ball, that he literally was stopping, stopping rotation, right?

And this absolutely leads to massive diesel and he was losing distance over the years,

right?

He's to flip risks and it absolutely leads to zero consistency.

And that's a common theme I hear every day, hey, Daniel, I'm looking for more consistency.

So I had to look Mike in the eye and say, look, man, your back swing is certainly not

the problem.

In fact, it's not even bad, man, but your swing, your follow through and your swing in

general pretty much just dies at the ball, right?

And you can have the prettiest takeaway in the world.

You can have the nicest, you know, P three, you know, you could have the nicest, you

know, at the top, you can have everything, right?

But if you don't commit to your finish, your swing and your game is just dead in the

water.

It will not get better.

And I would argue that over time, it'll get worse.

So we ditched all the other stuff that he was talking about with his other instructors,

right?

Employed this kind of fix where we stopped talking 100% about his backswing.

And we started working on his finish positions.

We call it the finished pose drill, right?

Your final pose is the ultimate diagnostic tool.

We got Mike to swing through the ball and freeze in his finish for like a full two or

three seconds, right?

Almost until the ball landed, almost like Roy, Marco Roy in this perfect finish where

he's actually staring down the fairway, you know, waiting for people to take his picture

kind of thing, right?

And if you're falling backwards, right?

If you're falling on your off, you know, you're as an example, he kept falling backwards.

So the weight wasn't on his lead leg, right?

Then we weren't swinging, you know, efficiently.

So we got him to realize the importance of swinging through the ball and the importance

of being in balance.

We had did a whole podcast on that before, right?

And making sure that he transferred weight through that swing, not just waiting just

to hit the golf ball, right?

I got to tell you the transformation in just like, I'm not even exaggerating.

Like 10 shots was amazing.

Once he stopped caring about the way he looked, right?

Once he stopped caring about his takeaway and all the other things that people had told

him.

And he started focusing on, you know, a balanced, complete finish as if we say it all

the time as if he was throwing the same seven iron that we were using into the golf

range, right?

And he's trying to throw it hard and far and straight.

What would that look like?

Well, you would certainly have some type of finish, right?

That would be big if you were trying to do that, right?

And that's exactly what we got.

And then over time, over like 20, 30 minutes, what happened was amazing too.

His tempo started to smooth out, right?

And all of a sudden, he started to find a little bit more yardage and then his balance

started to get a little bit better.

It wasn't 100% by the time he left, but it was way better.

So in just a 50 minute time frame, right?

We got this guy that was totally focused on his backswing was the issue, right?

All these other reasons, like I mentioned, we're a problem.

Everybody that he would work with before, we're talking about his backswing.

He needed to do this.

He needed to do that.

And in reality, all we needed to do to get Mike to hit better is to get him to go through

the ball and pay attention to the entire gaussly.

I'm telling you, this guy is an imagined customer, he's a disciple for imagined, all right?

So it was mind blowing to see the change in just those 50 minutes, all right?

The second one, this one, this one was amazing too.

This guy will call him Tom, right?

He, by the way, I see this all the time, right?

He came into our performance center, right?

Incredibly frustrated.

He had been diagnosed by a PGA Pro.

He diagnosed his own swing videos all the time.

And he comes in and he says, which is a PGA term I hear all the time, he's like, I'm swinging

like I'm helping a goat, air quotes, right?

I'm early extending.

I have this early extension problem that I can't stop.

And the same way that I just talked about Mike, right?

Okay, great.

I write it down in my book and we start the assessment.

And sure enough, this guy early extends, right?

It's an interesting early extension though because it is a source of power for this guy.

Because dude, he swings about anywhere from six to eight degrees over the top, right?

He had spent his entire off season doing share drills where he puts his butt against

a chair and he's trying to swing, you know, with keeping both cheeks, you know, his right

cheek and his left cheek on the chair, right?

Trying desperately to keep his hips back.

But the second he put a real golf ball in front of him, he stood right up and thrust it

his hips, right?

And he hit this weak slice and sometimes, you know, a fade actually almost all the time,

like a push made, and then a slice when he missed it, right?

And this guy, again, had been diagnosed multiple times, had gone to multiple instructors,

and every single one of them is trying to get him to fix this early extension, right?

And you know, look, he had done some research as well in his own.

He thought the problem was simply like poor posture or he said, you know, I'm doing air quotes,

he stiff, right?

And he's got bad hip movement.

And you know where I'm going with this, right?

We got him on the, in the sim and when we saw that six to eight to nine degrees over

the top consistently.

The club is coming down incredibly steep from outside to inside, right?

And it's almost coming in to hit him, I'm almost, you know, in the midsection.

So if he doesn't early extend, right?

He is not going to be able to get out of the way of this golf ball or excuse me, get out

of this way of this swing and it's going to be even worse.

So you can tell like when you start to work on something like, like that, if we started

to get this guy to start staying down for lack of a better right and stay through this

swing, he would have started hitting it off the heel, right?

The ball would have been going crazy to the right.

So what we needed to do is we had to explain to him, right?

That at the end of the day, all of our brain, we're all wired the same.

We say that all the time, right?

If your club is coming down that steep and that far over the top, right?

You actually manage to keep your hips back like you've been practicing.

It's like I'm the club, right?

Two feet into the ground behind the ball or right into his midsection, right?

You literally would, you know, hurt yourself and the brain knows that and that's, they

brain knows that's a disaster about to happen and it forces you to stand up and thrust your

hips through the ball, right?

So there's no drill that's going to stop that, right?

As you're swinging through, right?

This early extension, right, wasn't the disease, right?

Actually, it was the cure, right?

If this guy didn't do that, he wouldn't even be able to play golf.

So he was certainly working on the wrong thing, okay?

What we had to talk to him about was like, look, man, this is not about your hips or

your posture at all, right?

And we're not even going to talk about your early extension anymore because I would make

the argument that if we get you swinging air quotes more proper, right?

More inside the out, that is going to go away naturally.

So we're not going to fix something that we don't need to fix.

And when we start getting the ball moving or get the club face moving more inside the

out, right?

You're going to, your swing is going to present differently, right?

Your form is going to present differently.

So and I was pretty confident that that was not going to be there anymore, right?

And so we introduced this one o'clock feeling that we talk about almost, you know, most,

people talk about, you know, right field, you know, hit it to right field, swing the

right field or whatever.

And that's better than no command, but, you know, 1 p.m. is a very specific command and

your brain picks up on that easier and faster, all right?

So we put an alignment stick on the ground, slightly right of his target line at 1 p.m.,

right?

12 o'clock would be right in the middle.

We worked on his transition, getting him to feel like his back was staying, you know,

turn to the target for just a fraction of a second longer.

We all of a sudden started to drop the club down a little bit more than he was down to

the inside.

And then we asked him to start swinging out a long mat stick, right?

As if he was swinging again or hitting, you know, to that right field kind of analogy.

And an immediate light bulb went off in this guy's head.

I mean, immediately, right?

So all we really did was analyze what the real challenge in this guy's swing is, right?

And it certainly was at his early extension.

And if you listen to any of our podcasts, right, or taking a lesson from us or read any

of our books or anything, we believe that your club path is the number one indicator of

a good or bad golfer, right?

So if you can't swing from the inside out, you have a challenge.

And then from there, we go from club path to face direction, right?

How is the face in relation to the path?

And then from there, how are you striking the ball?

Where are you striking the ball?

And we, everything we do, we look through those three things as the lens of getting better.

So this guy had spent almost five years working on his early extension.

And in just one hour, I don't want to say it was completely gone.

But man, he was hitting the ball farther.

He was hitting the ball straighter.

I even looked at him and like, hey, man, when was the last time you hit this many baby

draws?

And you know the answer, never, right?

Absolutely never.

So there's another perfect example of a student that would have went one more season working

on the same thing that he'd been working on before, but it was the wrong thing, all right?

The wrong diagnosis, I don't really remember what he told me whether he diagnosed it first

or the PGA pro diagnosed it first, but it didn't matter.

Whoever gave him the diagnosis and his own that was incorrect, right?

And again, he would have never gotten better and just been at this plateau for a very, very

long time, all right?

The last one is John.

John is the classic slicer of the golf ball, all right?

For two years, he told me he's been going to the range and trying to fix his slice by

manipulating his hands, changing his grip, rolling his, he was told to roll and do air quotes,

roll his wrist at impact more, all right?

He was basically trying to play this, this game for lack of a better of split second timing.

What I mean by that was he's trying to get his hands, right, to make a different swing

every single time to close or to square on the ball differently every single time, right?

Almost steering the golf club because his body mechanics and his actual swing was all over

the place.

Just when you say that out loud, here's a guy that's trying to stop his slice by manipulating

his hands and we always say to imagine, look, bigger body parts beget smaller.

So hands are smaller.

So when you just say that out loud, if you're slicing the ball to the right, it's probably

not your hands, right?

And I just looked at him and said, look, man, you are trying to fix a problem that your

body has created in the first, I don't know, let's call it 16 to 18 inches of your swing.

And I told him, I said, look, no one, you included, right?

And by the way, he was a former D1 athlete, soccer player.

I said, so he had a, he was very in tune with his body and he listened intently on everything

I was saying, right?

But I said, you cannot, right, time a perfect wrist flip for lack of a better consistently.

And he was swinging it over 90 miles per hour.

I said, dude, it is impossible.

And he said, well, Daniel, I've done it.

I'm like, I bet you have 10% of the time, 11, whatever the number is, right?

Followed by another 17 bad shots, right?

And by the way, when you flick your wrist like that and you find the center and you time

it perfectly, the ball rockets off the face.

So it feels like, okay, that's what I'm going for, that's what I'm going for.

And I'm convinced that that is, in fact, what the previous coaching had I'm doing.

And I'm convinced that that was the look and feel, right?

Definitely the feel that he was going for.

So we simply introduced him to, let's call it a tilt and turn philosophy, right?

That the swing isn't about his arms, right?

It's about turning his core and actually using the ground, right?

We did things like a belly button drill where you just take a simple eight iron, you poke

at the end of the eight iron into your belly button, you choke down on the steel and you

just start this kind of one piece takeaway, right?

And if you start using your hands too much, then the club comes off your belly.

That drills like 200 years old, right?

We started making sure that his left shoulder stayed down, right?

He was the right hand to golfer and his right shoulder felt like it was going back, right?

So we're staying in his posture just a little bit longer, right?

All these things, right, started to get him to rotate his core instead of just worry

about his hands, right?

And he kept asking, well, what about my hands?

What about my hands?

I'm like, don't even worry about your hands.

Let's just get your body to rotate a little bit better, right?

Let's get your core to get involved or engaged in the golf swing, right?

We had him do a wall drill, right?

We put him back against the wall.

We move him out about a foot.

We use this wall all the time and we do use this drill all the time.

And we had him swing, right?

Within that confined area of 12 inches to the wall without touching it.

And before you know it, the transformation was amazing, right?

When we got him to understand that the true power and the straightness for lack of a

better of hitting a ball, right, comes from bigger body parts and body rotation and ground

forces, not how you time your wrist at impact.

I'm not even exaggerating, man, I thought this guy was going to cry, right?

I thought he was going to cry.

He hit more balls, he said straight than he, in one session, then he would in the whole

18 hour round or 18.

We probably did have an 18 hour round, he was sitting so many out of the house, no, in

his whole 18 whole round.

So another perfect example of probably bad instruction or bad diagnosis, if you would

not bad instruction, but yeah, maybe bad instruction.

Maybe bad diagnosis, right, focusing on the smaller things, the symptomatic things and

neglecting everything else, not looking at the real cause.

So there's three world examples that just happened in one week, and I took off Monday

by the way.

So it's only happened in four days.

So look, then moral the story, right?

If you are putting in the time, whatever that means to you, you know, you're practicing

once a week, you're practicing three times, you're practicing every day.

And you're not getting any better, right?

And your handicaps are not dropping.

You need an honest assessment.

I almost assure you you are not working on the right thing, right?

You do not need a quick tip.

It may be a quick fix, no doubt, but it may not be.

And it certainly isn't going to come from your playing partner who's a dentist by day

and a golfing partner by, you know, early evening and on the weekends, right?

There's no chance.

And I highly, highly doubt you're going to find it on social media or YouTube as well,

right?

Because how would you know what you're looking for?

So find a professional that you trust, find a professional that comes highly recommended

by the people that have been there, right?

If you look up your instructor and they've been in the business for 10 plus years and they

have 60 reviews, run.

There's a reason, run, all right?

Get to somebody that has a track record of fixing people, all right?

Not just giving lessons, but fixing people.

That's what we pride ourselves here at Imagine Golf.

That's what I pride myself on through every single lesson I do it every single day.

I want you to stop guessing, start knowing you'll feel 100% better, right?

Get to the range this weekend, all right?

Try maybe, if any of these sound familiar to you.

Maybe try some of the fixes that we give the finished pose drill that's, you know, stop

fighting your hips or whatever, all right?

And better yet, if you want me to evaluate your swing, just send it to me.

I'll get back to you within 24 hours.

It's free, all right?

And that's all I have, all right?

So for tips and tools, follow us on all the social media and I appreciate you listening.

Thanks.

All right.

Then that's today's podcast.

Thanks for tuning in.

Follow the button wherever you get your podcast and be sure to check out our site,

ImagineGolf.com.

Check out our YouTube page at ImagineGolf and around all the social media platforms, I'm

the same at ImagineGolf.

And here's to getting you this swing and the game that you always imagine.

Hey, Daniel here.

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